It's Probably Not About Cows

If you're a PBS or BBC geek like me, or just a lover of veterinary literature, the title All Creatures Great and Small probably brings up a very specific memory for you: Country vet James Herriot tending to his stable of animal patients. He treated horses, dogs, cats, and a pregnant cow or two--the latter by very memorably inserting his arm into the birth canal up to the shoulder. So when The Hollywood Reporter reported that the writers of Wanted have penned a script for a movie also called All Creatures Great and Small, it gave me a moment of pause. I started imagining Siegfried Farnon as the Morgan Freeman character, Sloan, recruiting young vets and barn yard animals into a secret fraternity of assassins. Dairy cattle would be instructed to "curve the milk" to hit their targets. But never fear; although Derek Haas and Michael Brandt's script is about animals, it's probably not about cows.

Instead, their new project is an original story. According to the article, it's "set in a world where the animals control the planet and humans are the minority." Brandt describes it as a "big, fun, fantastic Jurassic Park-type movie" where accelerated evolution is the result of humans sucking up all the oil and other resources from the planet. "The planet fights back," says Brandt.

If evolution really worked that way, ie sped up because of human proliferation, we'd be up to our asses in polar bears, feeding bread crumbs to dodo birds in the park, and saddling up quaggas for the rodeo. Generalists like roaches, rats, pigeons and even seagulls do spectacularly well in a world screwed up by humans, but somehow I don't think the movie will be about those creatures. The marketing tie-in opportunities for roaches are limited.

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